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Can We Talk Politics, Please?

BARACK OBAMA gets morning breath. Elizabeth Edwards felt her rib pop during some good loving with her husband, John.

And Rudolph W. Giuliani, by the testimony of no less than his third wife, is a really-high-testosterone guy.

Must we go there?

Too Much Information is a concept rarely honored in modern presidential politics. In a YouTube, cellphone photo, I’m-posting-it-on-the-Web world, no secret is safe, no taboo assumed, no limit observed. If a candidate, a grumpy spouse or a resentful second cousin once removed is foolish enough to talk about it — whatever “it” happens to be — that banality is pretty much guaranteed to be broadcast worldwide and discussed on a thousand blogs.

So Mr. Obama’s penchant for leaving dirty socks around the room is revealed by his wife, a teenager in New Hampshire asks John McCain if he’s too decrepit to be president, and reporters dissect Hillary Rodham Clinton’s (very discreet) hint of cleavage. The professional-image types shudder at the questions. But the answers set their heads to throbbing.

“This sort of diary tell-all has gotten so out of control,” said Susan K. Abrams, owner of Political Icon, an image development company that works with candidates nationwide. “These details are not that fabulously interesting.”

She offers a carefully crafted piece of advice for these middle-aged and older candidates and their spouses, which boils down to: Stifle yourself. Talk policy, talk good works, talk kids and hopes and dreams. Just don’t talk sex (please!) and go easy on the drugs and rock ’n’ roll. Paul Begala was an adviser to the crown prince of letting it all hang out, Bill Clinton. Mr. Begala heard his man talk on MTV about his taste in underwear — as the world knows, briefs over boxers. Mr. Begala was O.K. with that, maybe. But the confessionals from candidates have become more insistent.

Photo

Kiss and Tell John Edwards with his wife, Elizabeth, at a presidential debate.Credit
Doug Mills/The New York Times

“I’m all for democratizing dialogue, but this is just much too much information,” Mr. Begala said. “It’s appalling, really.”

Whatever — Mr. Begala acknowledges that this cat is long out of the bag. The membrane separating the personal, the political and the inane is porous. When even so wonkish a fellow as Al Gore feels compelled to give a big smooch to his wife at the Democratic Convention in 2000, the walls are tumbling down.

Michelle Obama may be a lead scout on T.M.I.: Campaign Trail 2008. She’s already told us that her husband (you know, the buff dude in the bathing suit?) leaves dirty socks around the house and is “snore-y and stinky” in the morning, and that her daughters talk to her about menstrual periods.

Walk farther down the T.M.I. trail and find Judith Giuliani, who posed sitting in her husband’s lap, holding his face and kissing him for Harper’s Bazaar. She purred about her adoration of “strong, macho” men.

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How American politics came to this pass has two answers. The short version starts with Jimmy Carter, who told Playboy magazine that that he had lusted in his heart after women. And it ends with Bill Clinton and the Starr report. President George W. Bush got the message; asked about his own past peccadilloes, he more or less said those were in the past.

The more complicated answer goes to our celebrity culture, which, as the cultural historian Lynn Dumenil of Occidental College notes, took root in Hollywood in the 1920s. Fast-forward eight decades, and celebrity politics can threaten to subsume the political culture, about which there is so much cynicism and wariness.

The challenge for any candidate or spouse is how to gain entry to this culture. The current gambit of choice is a variation on the language of Oprah, seeking a deeply “personal” and “honest” conversation with millions of Americans at once.

“They tell us a lot of things we’d like not to know and to forget as soon as possible,” said Nan Enstad, a cultural historian at the University of Wisconsin. “I see a longing for a sincere politics, but candidates haven’t created the language to express it.”

That’s the problem, isn’t it? Those from the same generation as the candidates may relate to the wife battling cancer or even the soap opera that is the Battling Giuliani Clan. But surely not all are terribly intrigued by the prosaic details of domestic life — those sounds, smells and emotions are a little too familiar.

As for the elusive youth vote? Theirs is a full-disclosure generation, no doubt. A 20-year-old might happily use MySpace to list her last four sexual partners alongside her favorite form of birth control. But that doesn’t mean she wants to hear people who are her parents’ age yapping about their sex lives.

“No one wants to hear or see their father and mother telling it all,” said Ms. Abrams, the image consultant. “I just don’t believe it’s effective.”

IT’S not clear how a candidate might guard the last shreds of dignity. Retreating into personal repression seems too 1950s. Maybe a 63-year-old candidate with a widening middle, a balding pate and a not-so-great temper stumbled toward one answer in New Hampshire the other day, if only because he had no other choice.

A young mother stood up and asked Mr. Giuliani about his three marriages and his frosty-to-nonexistent relationship with his two children. He fixed her with that stare.

“I love my family very very much and will do anything for them,” he said. “The best thing I can say is, kind of, ‘Leave my family alone, just like I’ll leave your family alone.’ ”